Jacoby’s argument is that this "fashion elevates confusion from a transitional stage into an end goal. We celebrate the fact that everything can be ‘problematized.’ We rejoice in discarding ‘binary’ approaches. We applaud ourselves for recognizing — once again — that everything varies by circumstances.” This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far, and surprisingly, Jacoby doesn’t offer much more of an explanation. Maybe he’s just trying to complicate our understanding of academic habits of mind. . . .

I think there are a couple of major reasons for this particular habit, which Jacoby rightly identifies as an excessively common one. First, this is one of the few tendencies of academic writing and speaking that has its roots in teaching. Students are forever wanting to offer simple, straightforward answers to difficult questions, presumably so they can move on to more important matters, which means that teachers are forever having to say, “Hold on a minute, it’s not that simple.” So the “complicating” tic is in part an extension of the everyday pedagogical situation.

But there’s something else, something more revelatory of the pathologies of the academic mind. “Complicating” gets you a twofer. If you arrive on the scene telling everyone that you see complexities that others have failed to note, you show your depth of thinking and your intellectual courage. (“I can dwell in the midst of uncertainties that lesser minds feel the need to resolve.”) But you are also not making any claims that are likely to be undercut. When one academic says “Other scholars have failed to note these complexities,” it’s almost unheard-of for another to say, “No, you’re just inventing all that crap, these matters are actually pretty simple and straightforward.” “It’s complicated” is, effectively, an irrefutable claim and is therefore the safest place to stand on any given issue.

So academics who talk this way gather unto themselves the aura of bold risk-taking, while simultaneously preserving themselves from any actual danger of refutation. And for an academic what could be cooler than that?

Leave a Reply

I think what you’re talking about is, for one thing, a product of the career academic incentive system. But it might also be a simple fact of the academic enterprise: the more you look at any one thing, the more complex it’s likely to seem. I think a fairly constructive definition of an academic or intellectual might be someone who looks for further complexity in a particular field or topic. While I certainly share a desire for members of the academy to make bolder claims— more claims of the style “it is untrue that”— I don’t see a rhetorical opening for a new school of “simplifiers.” I’m trying to think of a discipline that would be amenable to a radical simplification process and can’t really think of one. I mean, physics in a sense is a search for simpler understandings of the natural laws that govern the universe. But those new understandings themselves have consequences and corollaries that increase complexity. That complexity, of course— the introduction of ever-new topics and ideas— is necessary to sustain new entrants into a particular field. You don’t create many new dissertation ideas through radical simplification. Like any industry, academia is largely concerned with self-perpetuation. And so it goes.

Freddie: I think Jacoby’s point is not that we need more simplification, but that just “complicating” an issue is not sufficient. After complication, what? (At least, that would be my point.)

Justin: You’re right that Jacoby isn’t talking about all academics, but he’s not talking about just theorists either. The scholars he cites are not theorists as such, but their work is shaped by theory — which is true of many (most?) scholars in the humanities today. So I should have specified that he’s talking about the humanities pretty much exclusively.

No doubt much of the phenomenon you’re talking about is pathological (at least in the sense that it’s simply a kind of careerist move and doesn’t reflect any serious intellectual work) but I wonder if there aren’t still some good things that come out of it? It seems to me very much a good thing that scholars can’t mostly get away any more with simply having some set of laws of human life (think Marxism, for example) and explaining everything in those terms. The colonization of wider and wider parts of the academy by economic thinking (mostly in the social sciences) is pernicious precisely because it has the effect of reducing all of human life to a preference maximization calculus. So even if too many intellectuals (faux- and otherwise) are merely striking poses when they seek to “complexify” (now there’s an ugly word), there might still be some virtue in the result.

it’s very common in my field (sociology) for not just theorists but empirical scholars to try to “complexify.” i think a big part of the appeal of “nuance” and “complexity” is that they give qualitative scholars rhetorical leverage against their otherwise more prestigious quantitative colleagues since the latter routinely discard a lot of detail in order to code reality into columns and rows. although i am a quant myself, i think this is a good thing since well done qualitative research is very good at unpacking mechanisms and noticing the unexpected — things that quantitative research tends to be pretty bad at — and thus the attempts of qualitative folks to “complexify” serves as a good reality check for quantitative work.

one irony though is that you often hear qualitative scholars (including historians) use an aphoristic guideline along the lines of “complex situations require complex causes.” in fact, complexity scholars of the type found at the sante fe institute pride themselves on (plausibly) modeling complexity as an emergent outcome of /simple/ explanations like preferential attachment. likewise, pretty much the entire field of economics treats parsimony as the cardinal virtue, which is a major bone of contention between soc and econ.

While I do agree that – especially in my field – people often muddy the issue with unnecessary jargon and arguments that don’t prove very much of anything, I don’t think that this is all their fault. You’re overlooking a vital third motive for “complicating” things: tenure.

In a job market where more and more candidates have Ph.Ds from high-profile universities and fewer and fewer old people are dying, there are quite obviously fewer jobs to fill, and thousands eager to fill them.

A good diploma doesn’t carry the weight of yesteryear. You still need that – and more. In this case, articles or book deals or something that “guarantees” the universities, “Hey, this one’s making a mark on the field. This might be the next Zizek/Kristeva/Lukacs.”

This was my experience at the London School of Economics (I studied media)… This school knew how to become so complex it becomes unhelpful to living. Problematizing was the name of the game. And it drove me nuts. While it’s good to be critical, academia becomes irrelevant and unhelpful to the very areas it should be trying to improve… dividing scholars and practitioners even more. I guess you can’t keep feeling superior to everyone if you actually help them get better.